Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Prohibition, because it works?

A survey commissioned by the Greens earlier this year found pies, doughnuts, chips, fizzy drinks and oversize cookies were the staple items sold in school canteens.Shock, horror?

"This fund combined with new nutrition guidelines being worked on will require schools over the next few years will only allow schools to sell food and drinks that are healthy."Now the main point here is that those kids whose parents devolve the responsibility of food provision onto their kids will continue to do so - which is the root cause of this issue. Those parents that actually care enough to provide food rather than money tend not to have a high incidence of their children overindulging in these types of foods.

And lets face it - kids are crafty and greedy. If they have money and the school cafeteria doesn't sell pies - they will just get them from the Dairies. We saw this at the school cafeteria in New Plymouth where there were no sweets sold in the tuckshop. So kids just left school and went to the nearby dairy - yeah that was a great win getting children to sneak out of school grounds.

So the school even managed to persuade the dairy not to sell to children during school hours (and I'll bet you won't manage to do that everywhere). This didn't decrease the amount of kids spending their money on lollies though - it just delayed it until the end of the day meaning they didn't eat anything during the day, and then got their lolly fix. Again, a great win for everyone.